Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement suddenly yesterday. He was a player at Maryland back in the 60’s, and has been the coach there for 22 years, now. As I didn’t start rooting for the Terps until I went there for graduate school in 1993, he’s the only coach I’ve really seen them have (though I am, of course, aware of the Lefty Driesell years).

This comes as a surprise, but then, he is 66, and has been doing this for a long time. And in recent years there have been a number of stories about his distaste for the AAU system that has become such a shady and important part of recruiting, so it’s not that big a surprise.

As for his legacy, I agree with what Michale Wilbon said last night on PTI: they ought to put his name on the court. Not only because he took the Terps to the only two Final Fours in school history, and the only national championship, but for what happened before that. When he took over the program, they were reeling from the death of Len Bias a few years earlier, and were slapped hard by the NCAA with probation for violations under Bob Wade (whose troubled tenure came after Driesell was forced to resign following Bias’s death). His first few years, they were banned from tv and the post-season, and more importantly, nobody in Baltimore would give him the time of day, as Wade had come from there, and many people in the basketball scene felt he’d been badly treated.

The sanctions were far more severe than he’d been led to expect when he was hired, and a lot of coaches would’ve cut and run at that point. Williams stayed, and rebuilt Maryland into a relevant program in the ACC, and then into a national power. There was a stretch of six or eight years in the early 2000’s when Maryland vs. Duke was the biggest game on the ACC schedule– UNC-Duke was a bigger rivalry, but Maryland-Duke was a better game.

Yeah, the wins have fallen off in recent years, possibly because of the AAU recruiting thing. But most of the Maryland fans complaining that Williams has “lost it” have no memory of just how bad things were when he got there. As far as I was concerned, he had tenure– not for the national title, but for saving the program at its lowest point. You don’t have to look that hard to find once-great programs that suffered lesser shocks than Maryland did at the end of the 80’s, and have never recovered. Hell, within their own league there’s NC State, who had some great teams in the 80’s, and have been almost completely irrelevant for the last decade and a half.

It’s not all wine and roses, of course– the graduation rate for the basketball team has been pretty disgraceful (though the official stats for that are kind of bullshit), and there was an extended period of public sniping between Williams and former AD Debbie Yow that didn’t reflect well on anybody. But on the whole, Williams has been a great coach, and run a solid program for the last 22 years.

I have no idea who they’ll get to replace him– it’s kind of late for a coaching search, and they’re not exactly loaded with talent now that Jordan Williams has declared for the NBA. In principle, it’s a really good job– good history, good league, good location– but you never can tell with these things. Whoever it is will look weird on the sidelines, though. I’ll miss the excessive sweating, the obscenity-laced tirades (Williams has always been a great one to lip-read in reaction shots), and the general frantic intensity on the bench.

And like Wilbon said, they should put his name on the court. Because if anybody in the ACC right now deserves it, he’s the guy.

Books

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Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing